Knowledge that Transforms

Managerial human capital is a valuable organizational resource comprising individual-level capacities that draw upon and leverage the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) gained by employees both before and after promotion to managerial positions. While all organizations need strategically valuable managerial human capital, asymmetrical information in external labor markets creates uncertainty when firms look to hire individuals who can develop and/or provide these capacities. In contrast, internal labor markets, with the unique insights they have on current employees, are better equipped to assess workers’ managerial potential and competencies. As a result, an individual’s career outcomes in their current organization signal important information about their managerial human capital to hiring firms. In this paper we explore how signals sent by an individual’s time to first managerial promotion and time in managerial roles relate to their external mobility. We argue that there are nuanced and sometimes countervailing demand- and supply-side theoretical mechanisms that result in inverted U-shaped associations between these signals of managerial human capital and external mobility. We test our theory using complete career histories from a unique longitudinal and population-level dataset of 2,079 professionals employed in the scouting operations of Major League Baseball franchisees from 1988 to 2010. In addition to contributing to our understanding of signals and external mobility, the results of our logistic discrete-time event history analysis inform broader discussions concerning firm-specific human capital resources and provide new insights on the unique challenges associated with managerial human capital selection.

Our research addresses how organizations manage a shift from a single to a hybrid identity, a question that the identity literature still is grappling with. We address this question by reflecting on how organizations develop hybrid identities in response to institutional decline. Identity hybridization, we predict, takes place in stages via strategies that gradually hybridize the identity. We study how British political parties hybridized their identities in response to the decline of social-class politics over the period 1950–2015. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the identity projections of three political parties in their election manifestos provide support for our hypotheses.

Despite the wealth of theorizing about the relationship between business and government, research on corporate political activity (CPA) has yet to comprehensively consider how political context (e.g., party ideology and the degree of united or divided party government control) may shift the salience of how CPA materializes across industry-, firm-, and executive-level factors, which can shed light on the level of effects that appear to matter more (or less). To advance our understanding, we conducted a variance decomposition analysis on U.S. public firms (2001–2019), exploring the relative effect of each level on firm (lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions) and government actions (government contracts), and parsing our sample based on whether key government branches are Democrat- or Republican-controlled. We generally found that firm effects explain the most variance, followed by industry, while executive effects explain the least. However, this pattern shifts notably when considering political context across our sample period. As such, our findings have important implications for future CPA research and theorizing.

Does a firm that successfully absorbs knowledge from an alliance partner learn to protect its own knowledge in subsequent alliances? Our analysis of 529 alliances of East Asian firms during 1999–2015 suggests that as firms more skillfully overcome their partners’ knowledge protection, they learn to better protect their own knowledge in subsequent alliances. However, such vicarious learning increases at a diminishing rate and is further weakened by the firm’s relative absorptive capacity and the value chain scope of the previous alliance. Our study extends research on learning in alliances by demonstrating cross-alliance dynamics and by revealing conditions under which absorbing knowledge from previous partners helps a firm protect its own knowledge in subsequent alliances.

Hedge fund activism frequently has severe consequences for target firms and their management and boards. Yet, we know little about target management and boards’ response to activist attacks. To advance our understanding in this respect, we examine how the style of target management and boards’ written communication with activists influences campaign outcomes. Building on the behavioral mimicry perspective, we propose that language style matching (LSM) and emotional tone mimicry (ETM), which constitute two distinct types of verbal mimicry, are important communication style characteristics of target management and boards’ response letters that can induce activist demand withdrawal. Though LSM and ETM are reflective of different modes of conflict behavior, we further reason based on conflict management research that ETM in conjunction with LSM is particularly effective in inducing activist demand withdrawal. The positive effects of ETM in conjunction with LSM, however, are expected to fade with increasing length of target management and boards’ written response. Results of an empirical analysis of the public communication between activists and target management and boards in 150 U.S. activist hedge fund campaigns between 2002 and 2019 support these predictions. Our study extends research on financial activism by offering a novel theoretical explanation as to why and how target management and boards can avert activist demands. Further, we contribute to behavioral mimicry research by examining the individual and joint effectiveness of distinct types of verbal mimicry in the hostile context of activist hedge fund campaigns.

The formation of boundaries between established and emergent categories is a complex social process. Therein, our understanding of how symbolic boundaries translate into regulatory boundaries is underdeveloped. Extant research either treats laws and regulations for categories as given or assumes a seamless translation of a symbolic into a regulatory boundary. This sidelines that market participants actively contest and shape boundaries between categories. To address this lacuna, we open the black box of how symbolic boundaries are translated into regulatory boundaries. We adopt a discursive perspective and conduct a longitudinal study of the contestation around the categories of home sharing and short-term rental in Europe. Our analysis shows how symbolic and regulatory boundaries are formed in a causal sequential process, driven by shifts in the field positioning of market actors and in the discursive accounts they mobilize. We develop a theoretical model of the discursive foundation of category boundary formation. At the heart of our theorization are discursive accounts and how shifting coalitions of market participants mobilize them to shape the evolving symbolic and regulatory boundaries between an emergent and an established category. We contribute to category research by unearthing the interdependent formation of symbolic and regulatory boundaries and the role of discursive accounts in these processes.

Widespread social unrest occurred in the United States in the Summer of 2020. Citizens took to the streets to challenge the prevailing social justice framework. According to event systemstheory, these Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were high-strength, as they represented novel, critical, and disruptive events. They were also mega-threats as they focused on threats to the social identities of the marginalized communities. Because different approaches were taken in navigating the BLM protests by authorities, it was unclear what constitutes effective leadership during these events. We integrate insights from event-oriented literature with intersectionality of gender and race research to introduce an intersectional leadership advantage (ILA). This framework suggests that Black women, owing in part to the rich tapestry of their social experiences, tend to develop a distinct leadership style characterized by sensitivity to racial injustice, leaning into risk, and commitment to the community. These qualities enable Black women leaders to be effective during events like BLM protests. Utilizing data from six public sources covering 11,540 protests across 3,338 U.S. cities from May to August 2020, we hypothesized an interaction of city police chiefs’ gender and race in relation to protest-related violence (measured in three ways). Results revealed that protests in cities with Black women police chiefs were associated with the lowest levels of violence compared to other groups. This study provides insights into qualities associated with leadership effectiveness in high-strength mega-threat events, and it connects diversity in leadership roles to favorable outcomes.

Research points to the importance of establishing inclusive workplaces. Yet, the same research also suggests that getting employees to buy in and engage in these sorts of inclusive behaviors can be a challenging endeavor. While the current literature offers some practical suggestions for garnering inclusion among employees, most recommendations center on programs and contexts with direct ties to inclusion (e.g., diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings), which at times have limited success. Our article diverges from this approach by considering the impact of employee volunteering—a practice without explicit inclusion-related objectives—on employees’ inclusive behaviors. Drawing on a set of theories about cognitive processing, we propose that employee volunteering presents an opportunity to foster inclusive behavior by enhancing perspective taking. We further suggest that these benefits are contingent upon an individual’s motivation for volunteering—in particular, that the perspective-taking potential of volunteering is best realized when employees volunteer for prosocial motives and not for self-protective motives. We find support for these predictions in a combination of a laboratory experiment, a quasi-field experiment, and a multisource field study. The results advance our understanding of the types of unconventional activities—such as employee volunteering and volunteer motives—that can be leveraged into more inclusive behavior among employees.

Population ecologists have sidestepped infant industries. Moreover, prior examinations have overlooked the level issue of legitimacy and the role of illegitimacy in firm failure. We suggest that both legitimacy and illegitimacy are potent antecedents of firm failures in an infant industry. We separate industry-level legitimacy from firm-level legitimacy and propose a novel “one-stage model.” This model indicates that incumbents of the infant industry concurrently take actions to advertise their typical and atypical firm features to industry spectators. These actions not only elevate both the industry-level legitimacy of the infant industry and the firm-level legitimacy of the incumbents but also simultaneously incite competition among the incumbents. We used a manually collected database of news articles on Chinese bicycle-sharing companies to examine firm failures in this infant industry from 2014 to 2017. We found that at the industry level, while industry-level legitimacy reduces a firm’s mortality, industry-level illegitimacy elevates the firm’s mortality. At the firm level, we confirm both the detrimental and beneficial effects of interfirm competition. When the rivals of the focal firm tout their atypical firm features, the focal firm’s likelihood of failure increases; when rivals and focal firm try to highlight their typical firm features, the focal firm’s failure rate decreases. When it comes to firm-level illegitimacy, both the focal firm and its rivals’ illegitimacies increase a firm’s mortality. We confirm that legitimacy and illegitimacy are not two poles of a single continuum.

Asian Americans (AsAms) carry unique group identifications that likely impact how they navigate workplace racial discrimination. Yet, extant workplace discrimination research has not thoroughly considered the implications associated with such unique group identifications, especially given the context of American society’s increasingly polarized views of AsAms as outsiders versus insiders. To gain insights into these aspects, we conducted three studies using qualitative and quantitative methods. Our qualitative interviews (Study 1) with AsAm employees during COVID-19 reveal that AsAms have internalized society’s polarization of their American and Asian group identifications and navigate their workplace discrimination accordingly. Integrating these findings with group identification research, we develop a dual-serial-mediation navigation process model, whereby AsAms with strong American group identification intend to leave their organization via blaming and then not forgiving their offenders (i.e., “suffering path”), whereas those with strong Asian group identification intend to stay in the organization via perspective taking and then forgiving their offenders (i.e., “protected path”). In a different sample of AsAms who faced workplace discrimination, we found support for our model (Study 2). Finally, we largely replicated these results in a third sample of AsAms who faced workplace discrimination and found that such navigation processes were largely unique to AsAms versus other racial-minority groups (Study 3). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.